Innholdsfortegnelse for October 21, 2019 i The New Yorker

Your Birkin bag, your Chanel flats, your Alaïa bandage dress, your Rick Owens leather leggings—all your expensive so-called investment clothing was, in the olden days, an investment in name only. If you went up a size or down a size or just experienced a fashion rethink, there was no recourse; your wardrobe was largely illiquid. Other terrible things could happen. You might be an influencer and your followers could get tired of seeing you drag around the same Gucci clutch, but it cost so damn much that you had to wring all the value out of it. Or you might realize that you weren’t giving every Cathy Waterman stud in your collection sufficient ear time and yet were hankering for an Anita Ko climber. One recent Wednesday morning, a young…

In 2017, a few months after Forbes named Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the world’s richest man, a rumor spread among the company’s executives: Bill Gates, the former wealthiest person on earth, had called Bezos’s assistant to schedule a lunch, asking if Tuesday or Wednesday was available. The assistant informed Bezos of the invitation, and told him that both days were open. Bezos, who had built an empire exhorting employees to be “vocally self-critical,” and to never “believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume,” issued a command: Make it Thursday. Bezos’s power play was so mild that it likely wasn’t noticed by Gates, but within Amazon the story sparked a small panic (and, later, an official denial). Such a willful act of vanity felt like a…

They dropped late in the morning and then sat for an hour silently waiting for the kick in Billy’s boarding-house room, the grove of aspen trees on the edge of the field outside quivering in the summer breeze. The house was situated along the old road to the beach, not much more than ten miles from Lake Michigan. Inside, she sat looking at the poster Billy had tacked to the wall: a cartoon figure with a big leg extended, presenting an oversized shoe and, below the heel, the words “Keep On Truckin’.” She was waiting for it to move, which it did, eventually, dancing in a way that seemed remorseful, trying to lure her in, until it turned into an aberration that somehow mirrored Billy himself, thinning out into a…

The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman (Knopf). Lyra Silvertongue, the child protagonist of Pullman’s beloved trilogy “His Dark Materials,” is an undergraduate at Oxford in this, the second installment of a follow-up trilogy. The plot again involves the theocratic Magisterium (Pullman is an outspoken atheist) and a cosmology in which everyone has a “daemon”—an externalized soul in animal form. What is new here is the relationship between Lyra and her daemon, a pine marten called Pantalaimon, who disapproves of the philosophies that captivate her at university. The antagonism between the two, which borders on rejection, suggests that the adjustments of adulthood may become an important theme in the trilogy. Song of Songs, by Sylvie Baumgartel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). “You have shot your sunlight into my life,” a narrator named…

SACRED COWS Tad Friend, in his piece on Impossible Foods, a startup that makes imitation meat in the hope of solving climate change, writes, “Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes to as much global warming as flying from New York to London” (“Value Meal,” September 30th). As a professor who studies the environmental impact of livestock production, I was surprised that Friend relied on such a high per-pound emissions rate for beef, since most estimates are much lower. According to a recent paper in Agricultural Systems, the carbon footprint of four pounds of U.S. beef is equivalent to about eighty-eight pounds of carbon dioxide. Per passenger, a flight from New York to London adds roughly 1,980 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, about twenty times more than…

The seven-time Grammy Award winner reportedly left behind a vault containing so much music his estate could put out an album a year for the next century. —ABC News. 2025. Wildfires again sweep the West Coast. Windstorms bearing sand and ash cause mass evacuations in Southern California. Title track from Prince’s latest album, “Rain of Colors Other Than Purple,” reaches No. 17 on Billboard’s Top Forty. 2043. Last remaining Antarctic ice shelf slides into the ocean, leading to an additional two metres in sea-level rise and total inundation of lower Manhattan. “Prince 2 Infinity,” released in time to qualify for the 2043 awards season, wins Best New Secret-Vault Album of the Year. 2052. Canada, accepting the inevitable, cedes the lower half of its territory to migrant caravans from the United…

isn’t there anymore rode by iton the gray horse and insteada place where they go sick a place of only mist To properly understand the twelvePittsburghs of the heart but nothing to grasp or die forand when the adults told me to cryI sang on the uneven riser that swirlslike northern lights in the ear In 1955my mother’s father, a steelworker,was shot and killed in his hotel intervening in an attempted abductionthe shooter “crazed and lovesick” accordingto his mothermy mother only met hima few times, the last timeshortly before the murder, she saidshe took a train. In the testimony of another tenanthis face, after he staggeredout of the apartment, had “an iron color.”He fell into her arms. “I washolding him, trying to help,” she said.“But he was dead.” The kidnapperescaped…

In 2014, Laetitia Tamko, who records as Vagabon, released an EP called “Persian Garden.” Her singing was fitful and jagged, soaring one moment and sighing the next, all of it matching the flickers and moans of her electric guitar. She measured out small helpings of her transcendent voice, rather than showing it off all at once. The album ended with a song called “Sharks,” which she rerecorded and released under the name “The Embers” a few years later. “I feel so small,” she sings over a meek guitar line, sounding resigned but not despondent. “My feet can barely touch the floor/On the bus, where everybody is tall.” But then the band crashes in, and her voice surges from a shy whisper to a wailing laugh. “Run and tell everybody/Run and…

The Vatican, Kremlin, and Valhalla of modernism—home of the faith, the sway, and the glamour—that is the Museum of Modern Art is reopening, after an expansion that adds forty-seven thousand square feet and many new galleries, inserted into a MOMA-owned apartment tower next door and built on neighboring land gobbled from the late, by some of us lamented, digs of the American Folk Art Museum. Far more, though still a fraction, of MOMA’s nonpareil collection is now on display, arranged roughly chronologically but studded with such mutually provoking juxtapositions as a 1967 painting that fantasizes a race riot, by the African-American artist Faith Ringgold, with Picasso’s gospel “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907). The renovation is a big deal for the global art world, and certainly for New York. It runs up…

Tina Turner is seventy-nine and happily retired in Switzerland, but her story and her music are still rever-berating to the rafters in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” which is playing in London, in Hamburg, and now on Broadway. The show, in previews at the Lunt-Fontanne, traces the singer’s beginnings, in Nutbush, Tennessee; her Motown rise to fame; and, of course, her turbulent partnership with Ike Turner, whose creative control and physical abuse she escaped in the mid-seventies. Adrienne Warren (above) plays the title role. ART Roy DeCarava Zwirner CHELSEA The tremendous shows of DeCarava’s black-and-white work currently on view at two locations—“Light Break,” on West Nineteenth Street, and “the sound i saw,” on East Sixty-ninth Street—are the first large-scale exhibitions of his photographs to be mounted in New York since…

In February, 2017, I stepped off a plane in Tampa, drunk and dope-sick. I was twenty-four, and for the past eight years I had been shooting up heroin, cocaine, and all manner of pills: Dilaudid, Opana, OxyContin, Desoxyn, Ritalin. Now I was on my way to River Oaks, an addiction-treatment center, where I would spend the next forty-five days. River Oaks was on a gated campus, surrounded by a small forest with trails running through it. I was withdrawing from heroin and benzodiazepines at the time, and mornings were the worst: I woke in the dark at 6 a.m., the pain of withdrawal not yet mediated by the day’s first dose of Suboxone or Librium. I promised anyone who met me that I would die, simply die, of withdrawal; when,…

Imagine a novel about an ambitious, slightly coarse, provincial young man, determined to make his name in the capital city. He is tall and strong, with uncanny blue eyes—“sea-cold,” “merman” eyes. He talks too loudly. One of the capital’s most polished journalists dismisses him as a “swaggering farmboy.” Even the rich heiress who almost marries him agrees with him that he is like a mountain troll from a fairy tale; her sister, on first meeting him, noticed his “slightly provincial shoes.” But he has brilliance and will, and others welcome this young engineer with a head full of projects as “the prototype of the active man of the twentieth century,” a figure from a different, luckier tale, an Aladdin (as one of his friends crowns him) who will surely prosper…

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” the new play by Will Arbery, directed by Danya Taymor, opens on a stage so dark that your eyes grope for an anchor. They seize slowly into focus, and you start to see a Doppler map of finely parsed grays. At farthest stage right, there’s the back door of a house and a tiny patio. Off to the left, past a dead campfire and some chairs, is the true dark of the woods. By the door, it’s just light enough to see the figure of a man sitting improbably still, holding a rifle. In the moments before he shoots the gun—a real one (with blanks), startling and resonant in the small Playwrights Horizons theatre—the onstage scene looks like a rural Hopper. The silence around the…